MAPPING THE ACTIVATOR

Hey folks! Sitting in a cafe in Austin having partly recovered from an incredible weekend. Bassnectar show was really special – totally sold out, great energy crowd, and our set seemed to go over pretty darn well. Haj and I then headed over the Barcelona club to play a late night set for the afterparty and Sunday I shot over to a local festival called Flipside to throw down a set with DJ Manny. Thanks for hanging in through the past few tip-free days.

Today, I’m going to pick up where I left off with my new beat masher. In the last tip, I made reference to the fact that there might be a better to add in the multiple beat repeat layers, without using the Chain Selector.

The problem with the Chain Selector is this: when a chain is not selected, the input to the chain is muted. From a resource standpoint, this makes a lot of sense. A device that is not processing audio is not using CPU power. Where the problem part comes in is when there is an effect in the chain that has to have audio in its buffer in order to work. The delay in the third chain (“BR2”) is a perfect example:

When the chain that this delay lives in is selected, audio starts being fed into the device, and then there is a pause of 3 16th notes before any sound comes out. That’s not what I want here – I want to be able to activate the chain instantaneously.

The trick to this is to map the Chain Activators to the Macro knob instead. These mute the chain’s output instead of the input.

At the far right, you’ll see that I’ve reset the Zones under the Chain Selector so all four chains are active simultaneously. Notice the green dot in the corner of all four Chain Activators – these are all mapped to the first macro knob.

As the knob is turned to the right, the dry chain is turned off and the three Beat Repeat chains are added in one by one. This is configured in the Mapping Browser like this: